Influencer Marketing

As commerce moves moves more and more online, opinion leaders are poised to benefit immensely. The principle of a brand ambassador selling benefits of a particular brand, and people sharing that product experience with their friends and family is not new. It’s now captured in the format of a digital key opinion leader (KOL) acting as a brand ambassador, with digital influencers sharing the product experience with their audience online.

Given the scale of audiences, brands, and the limited number of influencers who geuinely engage online every day, those that play their strategies right, stand to become the authentic influencers of the next decade. At Lupo Digital, our Webluential business model is built on the basis of helping people market and monetise their digital publishing platforms, and add value to their audiences as well as brands.

Working with creators and brands, here are some of the insights we’ve learned through these experiences that will benefit influencers in their quest to make a career from their passions of creative content. 

1. Remain truthful
   Remain true to your content and your audience. Your unique creativity is how you developed your audience. Make sure your branded content is relevant to your audience, even though this might mean turning away certain brands. Growing and sustaining your audience is the only sustainable way to grow as a brand collaborator.
2. Sell value, not reach
   Many influencers pitch their reach to brands, only to be shown the door. With the thousand pound gorillas of Facebook and Google in the room, reach is not an issue for brands, it’s the way that content has been created to extend the brand message to the right audience.
3. Showcase your track record
   For most marketers, there’s work to be done vetting a long list of potential KOLs into a shortlist of content that they can share with their brand. By making a showcase page or media kit easily available through links in your bio, you increase your chances of getting onto that shortlist.
4. Share in the risk
   Being precious about limiting what you’ll do in exchange for a product, fee, or combination of the two will scare off brands. Often, brands are “dating” a number of influencers to ultimately find and grow their long term ambassadors. Just by going the extra mile on content, engagement and additional posts will differentiate you from the crowd.
5. Put lines in the water
   Given the rapid growth in the industry, there are a number of influencer platforms that offer accessibility to brands and marketers. Create profiles on a number of these. 

Lupo Digital is a digital marketing agency that specialises in inbound marketing, helping organisations with their client engagement and building strong ongoing relationships with their prospects and prospective clients. We have a passionate, experienced team dedicated to bringing all the benefits of inbound marketing. For more information about how inbound marketing works for your organisation, download our executive guide to inbound marketing.